Firefly bioluminescence III. Conversion of oxyluciferin to luciferin in firefly

✍ Scribed by Kunisuke Okada; Hideo Iio; Ichiro Kubota; Toshio Goto

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1974
• Tongue: French
• Weight: 188 KB
• Volume: 15
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0040-4039
• DOI: 10.1016/s0040-4039(01)91738-1

✦ Synopsis

After numerous efforts by a large number of investigators, it has become mostly possible to explain the phenomena of firefly bioluminescence concerning the detailed organic mechanism for overall reaction leading to light emission.

The extensive interest arising from the successful synthesis of firefly oxyluciferin ( I 1" led us to investigate further the chemical properties and biological roles of ( I ) in the firefly system. It was one of our recent results that oxyluciferin ( I ) has a strong inhibitory action on the firefly luciferase competitively to firefly luciferin ( III ).3) In other words, the luminescence product, oxyluciferin, surpresses the turnover of firefly luciferase for the next light emission.

Although many factors have to be considered to explain the flashing phenomena of firefly, 4) at least it must be operated in vivo that oxyluciferin is removed from and luciferin is supplied to the enzyme.

In this point of view, we posturated the possibility of conversion of oxyluciferin to luciferin in vivo because of the most economical explanation for the above two terms. This communication shows the experimental support on this hypothesis.